Recently, Android Wear’s companion app got updated bringing it to version 1.3. As usual, the folks over at Android Police have torn apart the APK to see what’s new in the update as well as what might be coming in the future. And they actually found quite a few gems in there. For one, there is a picker for “device to debug”, so you can choose which device to debug which is pretty sweet. Now this really only matters if you have more than one Android Wear smartwatch paired to your smartphone. It’s a great tool for developers, to debug their Android Wear apps, however. And see exactly what’s going on.
In Google’s official changelog for this update, they announce both interactive and Together watch faces for Android Wear, but they seem to be a bit different from each other. Interactive watch faces are pretty obvious, it allows developers to build in actions to the watch face. So that when a user taps on the watch face it won’t do the usual system behavior. Together watch faces are a bit strange but pretty cool at the same time. The users will be able to communicate events through the watch face.
There’s also a new icon shown in the APK. It’s a pretty simple icon, looks like a watch face with a person on the left side. Looks a bit material design to me. We have no idea what this icon is being used for, but the name is interesting. It’s named “wc_ic_launcher.png” which tells us it’s for some kind of launcher. Perhaps the launcher built into Android Wear from the last big update?
That’s basically everything that’s new in this new version of Android Wear’s companion app. If you haven’t picked up the update just yet, you can grab it from the link down below and sideload it onto your device. Simply download the APK. Then head into Settings > Security and make sure “Unknown Sources” are checked. Now open the APK and let it install. It’ll remove your old version of Android Wear and replace it with this version. You can grab it below.
Download: Android Wear v1.3